


Behind the scenes

by Aegir



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-01
Packaged: 2018-05-24 03:39:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6140401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aegir/pseuds/Aegir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look inside Nick Fury's head just after the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  Nick was never the type to run around with a trash can lid...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Behind the scenes

**Author's Note:**

> This took forever to write. Fury is a great character, but his head is a tough place to get into.

Nick had never run around with a trash can lid pretending to be Captain America. When he was growing up he’d wanted to be Batman.

(“That figures,” Hill said, when he’d admitted it to her in a mellow moment.)

Even so meeting Steve Rogers in the flesh was a shock, not least because Nick’s first thought was “But he’s just a kid.” Rogers looked like he should be starting his freshman year at college. He looked young enough to be Nick’s grandson, a thought that made him feel terribly old. So the day he called on Steve Rogers to pull him into the Avengers Initiative wasn’t one he was proud of, the kid should have been learning how to be young again, not being pushed straight back into a war. But Fury had been sending kids out to fight and die for years, and Rogers was no different just because he’d died in one war already.

Nick’s war was Vietnam. He’d been at war ever since of course, but Vietnam to him was always _the_ war, not that he told people that. He’d survived, which was the most important thing, and got himself noticed by officers which was the second most important thing and ultimately led to his being here. He didn’t have a lot of time for ‘Greatest Generation’ talk, in his view his father’s generation weren’t any better than his, they were just luckier in the way the public remembered the war they had to fight. But dead young men were dead young men whoever they’d been fighting, and whatever the cause it was always a waste. He sent young men and women through the doors to fight, but Nick never wanted to see the draft come back. Which was why he didn’t care for Captain America getting self-righteous over SHIELD’s new weaponry. He couldn’t be seriously angry with the kid though. Rogers was so frighteningly young.  

Rogers wasn’t cut out for spy work, and you didn’t need to be a shrink to figure he’d only signed up for SHIELD because he didn’t know what else to do with himself. But he was a one man army and great PR and that was enough for Fury. He also argued a lot, which was a good sign, no matter how naïve some of the arguments were. Nick operated on the principle that people who argued with you were more likely to be trustworthy than people who didn’t.

That was why he couldn’t quite trust Romanoff. He wanted to, he’d gone out on a hell of a limb to put her on the payroll. But she always agreed a little too smoothly.

That was why he trusted Hill, more than anyone. In her quiet way she was the most unshakable, the one who pushed him hardest. All the same, he’d believed ‘Don’t trust anyone’ to be the best motto, until the day he realised that meant you had nobody to trust.

He would, when completely alone and well away from anyone who had ever been connected to SHIELD admit strictly in the privacy of his own head that it had been a mistake to look down on Alexander Pierce. Pierce, born to money with his Ivy League place booked from his cradle and his line of officer ancestors. Nick always looked down, just a little, on those who hadn’t had to work for everything they had. Of course they were friends, Pierce was an extremely useful friend to have, useful for Fury and useful for SHIELD and Fury had been sure someone as arrogant as Pierce would never expect he was being looked down on for everything he’d never needed to work for. Fury had been just a little too confident that a man who hadn’t come up the hard way could never have the same level of cunning or repertoire of dirty tricks as one who had. And so he hadn’t seen he was being played.

He’d have liked to give Pierce a slower death for that. Because he could be wrong, not that he’d say that aloud, because he could never afford let anyone think he could fail, but he was human and he could be wrong. But he had been so sure he couldn’t be played, he was nobody’s puppet. Although he saw also Pierce hadn’t moulded Nick into the shape he wanted. There’d been no need. He’d worked his network, pulled his strings, and got Fury the job as head of SHIELD, because Fury was already the shape he wanted. Nick had thought he’d got there on merit, thought it was because he was good.

Turned out good wasn’t the word.

(Of course Pierce wouldn’t want someone fully in HYDRA heading SHIELD. Too much of a potential rival.)

That was the crux of it, he realised, in the days when he refused painkillers because they made him more muzzy than the pain did. He’d never pretended to be a good man, but he’d thought he was acting for good. Doing the dirty jobs because somebody needed to. The problem with crossing lines for the greater good is that the more lines you cross the more you stop seeing them at all. Looking at his choices he wonders when he last remembered what the good was.

It had all been there, in plain sight. All except the skull logo. Nick does not like the knowledge that he had not recognised fascism until he saw its brand name. He’d never pretended to be Captain America, but he’d known what HYDRA was long before he signed on with SHIELD. Except he hadn’t understood what HYDRA was, or he’d have recognised SHIELD was the same.  

An old SHIELD hand had given Nick a tip once. _Ever heard the saying ‘If you want to get there, don’t start from here’? Start wrong, and you end up rounding Cape Horn when you’re looking for the Nile. And then you find you should have been watching the Hudson all along._ It was no satisfaction that he’d only been the latest in a succession of SHIELD heads rounding the Horn, when they should have been looking for the enemy in a mirror.

He’d signed off on mass murder by drone. He was going to have to live with that.

Because Nick was damned if he wasn’t going to live. He might never pay off his mistakes, but dwelling on that will send you crazy, so he doesn’t.   He plans on looking forward, not back.

That means a change of direction. The choice to stay officially dead is not made lightly. He is aware that it has too many personal advantages to be seen as selfless, that it allows him to dodge the inevitable hunt for a living scapegoat, the inevitable questions of whether he was complicit or simply stupid. It had not been planned: he had deliberately exposed himself to the Council, he had honestly attempted to bring Pierce in alive. But then Pierce was dead, and the Council members were dead, and Rogers despite his new commitment to openness had stopped short of insisting Nick expose his own survival. It seemed such an ideal time to break with the past. To reject the wielding of state sanctioned power, to become the secret hunter instead of the man who commands others to hunt. To change his ways.

He does dwell on it. Does question whether he has merely exchanged the mailed fist for the knife in the dark. Whether it will not be too easy to fall lower, whether it would not be better and braver to face the music, rather than to seek lone wolf redemption.

But Nick will always be himself, and that was never a man who wished to stand in the sun and inspire people with talk of freedom. So Nick Fury will leave being Captain America to the man who knows how to do it, even as he recognises that man has proved him wrong in so many ways.   He will return to the shadows.

He’d never been the type to run around with a trash can lid, after all.


End file.
